Comment 11 for bug 423448

I attached a comment to 22756 where they had it flagged for wishlist, but given
the viciousness of the SATA drive order bug, being able to see
partition/volume labels has become critical.

On Friday 04 September 2009 03:27:31 am Colin Watson wrote:
> *** This bug is a duplicate of bug 408699 ***
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/408699
>
> In general, it is not possible to even discover the BIOS ordering from
> Linux. This perhaps non-obvious constraint (beyond the control of GRUB)
> makes all kinds of things rather difficult. I have banged my head
> against this fruitlessly in the past, and have no intention of wasting
> very much time on it again; it was, mostly, a blind alley. Dell have a
> set of BIOS extensions called EDD which let you do a little better, and
> it might be worth supporting those in GRUB's device.map code, but
> they're only supported on a fraction of today's PC-class computers.
>
> Furthermore, BIOS ordering is unstable (in particular, consider
> removable drives), so we can't rely on it, convenient as it might be in
> some scenarios. This is why we normally use UUIDs when booting operating
> systems from GRUB, and in general try to avoid relying on BIOS ordering
> at all. However, FreeDOS probably doesn't support this kind of scheme.
> I'll endeavour to test FreeDOS in a multi-drive test system. I don't
> think that it is directly related to the things I'm trying to discuss
> with Felix here, although fixing those is probably a prerequisite for
> making this work reliably.
>
> Your comments about Image for Linux (not a product I'm familiar with)
> are presumably simply due to them using a new kernel which enumerates
> devices in a different order. I haven't taken this into account because,
> while I'm sure it is a bug, it is not my problem; I'm afraid that this
> is beyond my control and nothing to do with GRUB. No doubt the
> application needs to improve how it displays disks.
>
> I'd appreciate a *separate* bug report (on partman-base) about
> displaying volume labels in the installer's partitioner. Let's try to
> keep this bug report somewhat under control in terms of scope so that we
> can fix it.
>

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